New
York’s Governor George Pataki pardoned comedian Lenny Bruce this holiday
season for an obscenity conviction that happened almost forty years ago. It
was the first posthumous pardon in the history of New York State and Pataki,
a Republican who has nothing politically to gain from the decision, deserves
the public’s appreciation. But the humorist himself was unable to celebrate
his vindication. He died, weighted down by his legal troubles, a broken,
bankrupt and defeated man, believing passionately that the Bill of Rights
would save him.

Lenny
Bruce was one of the great comedians of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His
influence on the world of stand-up comedy is profound. Think Richard Pryor,
Robin Williams, George Carlin and, for better or for worse, just about every
stand-up comedian of the modern era.

Bruce
came out of the Jewish Borsht Belt and the hipster world of improvising jazz
musicians. He wrote his own material and then riffed on it as if he was
Charlie Parker taking a bebop solo. Bruce was determined to speak like
Americans talked. His monologues mixed hipsterisms, Yiddish phrases, and
vernacular English with taboo “four letter words” that no one was supposed
to use or write in the scrubbed, buttoned-down world of postwar America.
With Lenny Bruce, the Emperor was always naked. “I want to take the covers
off,” he said. “Whatever you do, you should say the words.”

Ostensibly, it was his use of “dirty words” that got him into trouble.
Though he performed only in nightclubs for adults only, the guardians of
public morality consistently harassed him. Undercover police agents would
tape his shticks and then bust him for obscenity. But only in New York City,
in 1964, did the charges stick. Poor Lenny. In court he had to listen to an
undercover cop read a verbatim transcript of his stand-up routine without
any understanding of the comic craft. “He’s bombing,” Bruce supposedly told
one of his lawyers. “And for this I’m going to jail.”

Facing
four months in the workhouse, Bruce fired his lawyers, immersed himself in
constitutional law, and prepared a legal appeal. A better comedian than he
was a lawyer, Bruce botched his case and lost the appeal. Governor Pataki
described the pardon as "a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding
the First Amendment." But in doing so he noted that he probably would not
have been a fan of Bruce's humor. "I'm not a great fan of profanity as
satire, but it is protected speech, and we certainly cherish all our
freedoms," Pataki said.

While
profanity was the subject and the obsession of New York’s prosecuting
district attorney, it was not the point of Bruce’s nightclub act. While
other comics focused on human foibles, Bruce’s subject, his obsession
really, was hypocrisy -- the well-manured field between official statements
and real-life acts, as well as the self-righteous delusions of everyday
life. “Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to
God,” he famously said. And, “In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is
in the halls.” As civil liberties attorney Floyd Abrams told writer and
long-time Bruce supporter Nat Hentoff, “As we look back on the prosecution
of Lenny Bruce, it was less about `bad language’ than about supposedly bad
thoughts -- thoughts about religion, culture and sex that must be protected
in a free society.”

Bruce’s quest for truthfulness struck even the conservative National Review
as admirable. After his death, a staffer wrote, “He also had, more than most
commentators on the contemporary world, the tragic sense of life, and for
many people his relentless honesty about the world as they see it is the
closest thing to heroism they have encountered.”

One of
the young people who considered him a hero was political activist Abbie
Hoffman. Hoffman saw Bruce’s use of language as a liberating and
truth-telling force. He wanted to expose the hypocrisy inherent in the
Vietnam War. The government and its supporters thought it all right to
napalm children or destroy a Vietnam village “in order to save it,” but
would not tolerate the public expression of a four-letter word. Freedom of
speech, bottom-line, means the right to describe government policy or call
an elected official a dirty word.

Lenny
Bruce opened the door to public profanity and Abbie Hoffman and his friends
blew the door off its hinges. But there was a context to their profanity, a
need to break through silence and fear and say publicly what was in a lot of
people’s heads. That context is gone. Now we have Hollywood movies in which
scripted profanity takes the place of emotionally descriptive words. And
comedians now use “gutter language” as a cheap and easy infantile means of
getting laughs. As a fan of both Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman, I believe
we’re all degraded by the gratuitous use of “dirty words.” If Lenny Bruce
were alive today, he’d be satirizing the promiscuous profanity that’s become
commonplace.

Obscenity was the excuse but not the real reason that the authorities busted
Lenny Bruce, and it is not the reason he should be remembered today. It was
his acerbic and accurate social satire that made him dangerous, funny, and
brave. Lenny Bruce’s pardon is being described as a “victory for free
speech.” Some victory. A citizen says something that offends the
powers-that-be and is silenced by the law. Forty years later the law says,
sorry, we made a mistake. What’s important is not the pardon but the
silencing. Free speech is not something you celebrate in theory or in
retrospect. It’s a right to be exercised everyday, without fear or threat of
imprisonment, and let the chips fall where they may.